Kinyarwanda
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Proto brings redress to open, interoperable instant payment rails. It’s now listed on the Mojaloop Foundation’s Adjacencies Directory, under consumer protection and dispute management.
Mojaloop gives central banks and payment operators an open-source foundation for inclusive, real-time payments, without proprietary lock-in. As these systems scale, they reach millions of new consumers – and become a target for the scam operations that follow instant payments everywhere.
That’s the gap Proto is built to close. The Trust Layer is Proto and FNA’s joint answer to it, built from three parts that only work together. Redress without recovery tells a victim what happened, but not how to get their money back. Recovery without redress gets the money back, but never reaches the person who needs it. Neither works without a direct line into the payment rail itself:
- Grievance redress (Proto) – intake, routing and resolution, handled by AI agents in local languages
- Fund recovery (FNA) – tracing a scam payment across institutions in real time, to freeze funds within the recovery window – often under 24 hours – before they disappear for good
- The instant payment system itself – the rail that redress and recovery both need to be wired into directly
The need is real: Curtis Matlock, Proto’s CEO, has pointed out that scams and fraud already make up 21% of complaint intake across Proto’s regulatory AI agents.
The model is still taking shape on the ground. In Pakistan, a project on the Raast rail, backed by Gates Foundation funding, has just kicked off. In Rwanda, a Proto-and-FNA consortium demonstrated a working prototype with the National Bank of Rwanda at a Cambridge hackathon, winning the event’s anti-scam category – though the prototype didn’t use real data or live integrations. The two partners also share a 2025 G20 TechSprint award for the underlying approach. FNA has already shown what coordinated fund recovery can do on its own: in Malaysia, the share of funds frozen rose from 0.5% to 30% in about seven months – a 60-fold improvement. FNA’s CEO, Kimmo Soramäki, has framed the Pakistan project’s goal as putting the lowest-income consumers and scam victims at the centre of the response. Proto sets out the full design in its blueprint for redress and fund recovery in digital public infrastructure, co-authored with FNA.
Discover the design thinking behind the trust layer
Six instruments for stakeholder coordination, sustainability planning and instant payment integrations.
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A year of shared stages
The listing builds on a year of shared stages with Mojaloop. At the Inclusive FinTech Forum in Kigali, held alongside Mojaloop Foundation’s MojaCom 30 programme, Curtis joined a panel on resolving errors and disputes without undermining trust in real-time systems, while Noella spoke on why fraud in instant payment systems disproportionately affects women. Both returned to the stage at MojaCom 32 in Accra, where Noella spoke on managing customer disputes at scale – a conversation Proto has since written up in full. The two organisations keep coordinating on trust-layer design, and on sustainability models for instant payment systems beyond 2030.
Noella Dushime (right) on the customer disputes panel at MojaCom 32 in Accra, Ghana.
The principle underpinning all of it is simple: systems that expand inclusion should also protect the people they include. Open, interoperable payment rails and open citizen redress belong together, designed in from the start rather than bolted on after trust has been tested.
For institutions building on Mojaloop, this means a clearer path to embedding a trust layer – grievance intake in local languages, automated routing, and escalation of scam reports to track-and-trace, built into the payment system from the start. It’s one piece of Proto’s wider partner network, alongside its other ecosystem relationships.